Abstract
Today’s welfare system derives from the dissolution of the English poor laws. The old poor laws were the first laws established in a Western country that dealt with the management of poverty on a governmental scale. This chapter deals only with the philosophical aspect, and more precisely, with the epistemological aspect of the management of poverty and the resistances to it as we find them in Shakespeare. The relevance of the knowledge of poverty and wealth, or of the poor and the nature of money, during this period lies essentially in this being the first moment of a critical figuration of the poor and money. The poor was defined as such (the beggar, the vagabond) and as such reduced to the content of containment policies; money was perceived and understood in its ontological dimension: as the maker of human relations of power. The depiction of the poor as destitute beggars and of money as the substitute for human relations (or rather as cause of power relations) are fiercely criticized in Shakespeare. This is the sense of Lear’s words to Tom O’Bedlam—“Thou art the thing itself”—as well as Parolles’s statement: “Simply the thing I am shall make me live” (All’s Well that Ends Well, 4.3.334–35)1 I want to take you on the plane shaped for us by Shakespeare: the creative resistance to the definitions of a human being according to poverty and money. If we pay attention to the content of the laws enacted in 1597 we will understand how close they are to today’s reality and legislations regulating poverty and immigration in Europe.
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Notes
See Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2001), preface, xxiii–xxvi, chapter 3. For more on representing, see mainly p. 64 fl.; for more on exchanging, see chapter 6, especially pp. 180–232.
Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), chapter “Virtue and Fortune: The Machiavellian Paradigm.”
Such as, among many others, Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-Industrial Europe (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979),
as well as S. R. Ottaway, L. Botelho, K. Kittredge, eds., Power and Poverty: Old Age in the Pre-Industrial Past (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002);
Giovanna Procacci, Gouverner la misère: la question sociale en France (1789–1848) (Paris: Seuil, 1993);
and Procacci, Poor Citizens: Social Citizenship and the Crisis of the Welfare States (Badia Fiesolana: European University Institute, European Forum, 1996).
Among others, David Eastwood, “The Politics of Poverty,” part 2 of Governing Rural England: Tradition and Transformation in Local Government 1780–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994);
George R. Boyer, An Economic History of the English Poor Law, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
I cannot summarize here the beautiful and essential works of William Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996)
and Paola Pugliatti, Theatre and Beggary in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). I refer to their works for a deepening of the argument in these directions.
A further analysis should also compare these Statutes with the ones of 1723 and 1782. See Paul Slack, appendix to The English Poor Law, 1531–1782, New Studies in Economic History (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 55–56.
Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, eds., Tudor Royal Proclamationss III (London: Yale University Press, 1964–69), pp. 187–94.
See Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor Stuart England (London: Longman, 1988), p. 21, 30.
See also Penry Williams, The Tudor Regime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 196, pp. 201–3.
See also Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson, Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theatre (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
This occurs already in the tenth century BC. See Majid Rahnema, Quand la misère chasse la pauvreté (Paris: Fayard, Actes Sud, 2003). Allow me to refer to my entry “Ancient Thought” in Encyclopedia of World Poverty (New York: Sage Publications, 2006).
Quoted in An Acte for Punyshment of Rogues, Vagabondes and Sturdy Beggars, 39 Elizabeth, c. 4, 1597, referring to “all idle persons going about in any Cuntry eyther begging or using any subtile Crafte […] or fayning themselves to have knowledge in Phisiognomye, Palmestry or other like crafty Scyence, or pretending that they can tell Destenyes, Fortunes or such other like fantasticall Ymagynacions” (Richard Henry Tawney and Eileen Edna Power, Tudor Economic Documents, vol. 2 [London: Longmans, 1924], pp. 346–62).
See Geoffrey Ingham, The Nature of Money (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), p. 123.
On the acts on value, see William H. Cunningham, The Growth of English Industry and Commerce, vol. 2 (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1968), p. 127 fl.;
and Conyers Read, “Profits on the Recoinage 1560–1,” Economic History Review 6 (1935–36): pp. 186–92.
For the swinging movement of Elizabeth’s revaluation politics, see the draft Revaluing Coinage (1562) in Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, eds., Tudor Royal Proclamations II: The Later Tudor (1553–1587) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 183–84. See also Suppressing Rumors of Coin Devaluation, March 13, 1562, in Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations II, p. 185. It is difficult to extrapolate these Statutes from their context or from a reading of all of them and the movement among them. I take as assumption Ingham’s reading, and the fact that Elizabeth, with the reformation of coinage on September 27, 1560, gives a standardization to the value of money, which is the main point of interest for our discourse.
Anonymous, Compendieux ou brief examen de quelques plantes, in Jean-Yves Le Branchu, Écrits notables sur la monnaie (Paris: Alcan, 1934), vol. 1–2, quoted in Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 230.
By “virtuality of the poor” I refer here to the debate on the usus pauper as it is found in the work of Petrus Johannes Olivi. For the medieval discussions on this, see Giovanni Tarello, “Profili giuridici della questione della povertà nel francescanesimo prima di Ockham,” in Annali della Facoltà di Giurisprudenza dell’Università di Genova, vol. III (Milano: Facoltà di Giurisprudenza, 1964), pp. 338–448;
Paolo Grossi, “Usus Facti: La nozione di proprietà nella inaugurazione dell’età nuova,” in Quaderni Fiorentini, vol. I (Milano: Giuffré editore, 1972), pp. 287–355. Aristotle’s definition of the slave, in Politics 1260 a 33-b5, is exactly defining this space: the dynamis of the slave is what is in the master’s hands.
The predecessor of this is the usura, which medieval theologians were well aware of. See for example, Petrus Johannes Olivi, Tractatus de Contractibus, in Un trattato di economia politica francescana: il De emfitionibus et venditionibus, de usuris, de restitutionibus’ di Pietro di Giovanni Olivi, ed. Giacomo Todeschini (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, Studi Storici, 1980), pp. 125–26.
See Ryan, Philosophers on Shakespeare, ed. Paul A. Kottman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 89.
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© 2013 Margherita Pascucci
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Pascucci, M. (2013). The Bloody Legislation. In: Philosophical Readings of Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137324580_5
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